Friday, September 02, 2016

The Ailes chronicles. OMG.
by digby

Pull up a chair and read the most amazing story you will read all year, and that's including the story of the Trump campaign. This is the big one by Gabriel Sherman about the most influential right wing propagandist of the past half century Roger Ailes.

Here's just a tiny excerpt and it isn't even the worst of it:

After Luhn left Fox, Ailes took additional measures to conceal his harassment of employees. In 2011, he installed a floor-to-ceiling wooden door outside his executive suite. Only his assistants could see who entered his office. According to a former Fox producer, Laterza entered fake names into Ailes’s datebook when women went into his office: “If you got ahold of his ledger, you would not know who visited him.”

Still, the whispers about Ailes and women were growing louder. Karem Alsina, a former Fox makeup artist, told me she grew suspicious when Fox anchors came to see her before private meetings with Ailes to have their makeup done. “They would say, ‘I’m going to see Roger, gotta look beautiful!’ ” she recalled. “One of them came back down after a meeting, and the makeup on her nose and chin was gone.”

In 2012, after I had been reporting my Ailes biography for a year, Megyn Kelly became so concerned about the rumors that she went to Ailes’s then–PR chief, Brian Lewis, and attempted an intervention, according to a person close to Kelly. She told Lewis that Ailes was being reckless and that I might include his behavior in my book. (I did report the stories of two women who claimed Ailes had harassed them earlier in his career, and though I heard rumors of Ailes and Fox News women, I could not confirm them at the time.) Lewis, according to the source, asked Laterza to tell Ailes to stop because he thought Ailes might listen to his longtime assistant. Instead, according to the source, Laterza told Ailes that his PR chief was being disloyal. Less than a year later, Ailes fired Lewis.

Grab a drink or a cup of coffee and read the whole thing. Then ask yourself what it means that this man has been the single most influential right wing strategist and media figure of the past 40 years.

Oh, and yeah, it's important to mention that he's working closely with Donald Trump. Does anyone have a problem with that?